Lyndon Baines Johnson is having an awfully good year. Fifty years after he was swept into the White House by the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Americans are remembering Johnson’s presidency with previously unknown fondness and nostalgia. This summer marked the 50th anniversary of his signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, an achievement which, along with his landmark Voting Rights Act of 1965, made Johnson the most consequential crusader for the cause of racial equality to serve in the White House since Lincoln. In All the Way, the popular Broadway play, Bryan Cranston has reincarnated President Johnson in his golden 1964 glory, a larger-than-life master of the legislative process, not yet besieged by Vietnam. In a country ruled by political paralysis and polarization, people are understandably drawn to the image of a leader who could force Washington into action—a modern day LBJ.

Might Hillary Clinton fit the bill? Clinton, some have suggested, possesses many of the Texan president’s greatest strengths and could be the Johnson to Barack Obama’s JFK. Like Johnson, Clinton hopes to follow an inspiring but often ineffective president from her own party, to be the less smooth but more savvy successor, the skilled-operator who skips the stirring speeches and simply gets the big things done.

Clinton has invited comparison with Johnson in the past. When asked in her 2008 primary campaign to comment on her then-opponent Obama’s emphasis on hope, Clinton unwisely made a flattering comment about Johnson at the expense of Martin Luther King Jr. "Dr. King's dream began to be realized when President Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act," she said. "It took a president to get it done."

Her campaign jumped to clarify her comments—no, no, she wasn’t disparaging King’s accomplishments. But the remark revealed a core Clinton belief: Change doesn’t happen through words. Change comes from savvy pragmatism, hard experience, and backbreaking work. Johnson had that combination, Clinton was saying, and so does she.

Clinton, of course, is hardly an LBJ clone. Johnson rose to prominence practicing an earthy, full-contact politics, working over legislators with the famed “Johnson Treatment.” Clinton excelled at the inside game in the Senate, but her global celebrity status never would have allowed her tomassage and manhandle fellow senators in the Johnson manner, even had she been so inclined. Johnson could master policy details but was only interested in doing so in the service of a larger political goal. Clinton tolerates retail politics but only because politicking is necessary for tackling the big policy questions she loves. “Unthinking emotion is pitiful to me,” a college-age Clinton wrote to a friend. Johnson’s intuition for emotion, pitiful or glorious and everything in between, was what made him the greatest legislator of his time.

Still, Clinton does possess some key similarities to Johnson, and not just to the “good” Johnson of 1964. In her career in Washington, she has demonstrated his skillful relationship-building and dogged determination. But at times she has also mirrored some of the worst aspects of Johnson's complex persona: his difficulty being "himself," his preoccupation with loyalty, and his fear of conspiracies he could not see. Some key lesson from Johnson’s presidency may prove relevant to Clinton as she ponders another White House run.

1. Pragmatism isn’t everything. No modern president was better at practical legislative politics than Johnson, the former Senate majority leader. Too much of Johnson’s success is ascribed to his interpersonal gifts. Huge Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress were the biggest factor in his success, although Johnson’s intimate knowledge of the key figures on Capitol Hill and his sharp sense for what was realistic and achievable helped earn him the most significant legislative record of any president since FDR. But his strong sense of the political realities of Congress did not translate into an intuition for the political reality of the country at large. As he scored his Great Society triumphs, he failed to see how the American electorate was changing. That left him vulnerable to an antigovernment backlash that would bring his string of liberal achievement to an end.

As president, Clinton would almost certainly be matched with a far more polarized Congress than Johnson, but her strong relationships with senior senators in both parties might help her find deals that have eluded Obama. Since the ’90s, Clinton has proved adept at focusing on what’s possible in politics and putting aside what isn’t. But she too has struggled to sense coming shifts in public mood and has paid a political price.

2. Paranoia often springs from legitimate reasons for fear. As Johnson’s presidency began to falter in the summer of 1965, journalists complained about his paranoia and his obsession with secrecy. What they rarely noted was that Johnson had good reasons to be secretive and paranoid: former aides and family members of JFK whispering all sorts of nasty things about him, an Eastern press corps that found his Texas customs disdainfully vulgar. Clinton, too, has legitimate historical grievances with an organized opposition and a press corps that has not always treated her fairly.

But giving into the paranoia and conspiracy hunting only hurt Johnson, leaving him isolated and under siege from the press. In response to past attacks, Clinton has turned to conspiracy-minded loyalists and tried to exert maximum control over her public image. She might do better to follow a rule that Johnson could never grasp: Confident politicians gain power when they give up control.

3. Beware the “toughness” trap. Today, we draw a sharp line between the domestic Johnson presidency, with its shimmering Great Society accomplishments, and the Johnson foreign policy, which produced the war in Vietnam. But in the actual Johnson presidency, no such line existed. His key decisions to fully Americanize the Vietnam conflict coincided with his push for the Great Society in 1965. This was no accident: As a Cold War politician, Johnson believed that a Democratic president who pursued progressive policies at home had no choice but to display maximum toughness in foreign fights.

The Cold War is over, but Clinton is still using the same playbook. Her vote to support the Iraq war in 2003 did not happen in a vacuum—it was part of a multiyear effort to toughen up her liberal image from the 1990s. Clinton now says she’s learned from her mistakes in Iraq, but history speaks to the enduring allure of the cult of toughness in Democratic politics. Johnson had seen how it create disastrous problems for Harry Truman in Korea and for Kennedy at the Bay of Pigs, but he nonetheless felt he had no choice but to escalate in Vietnam.

A run for the presidency will no doubt offer more lessons from Johnson, not all of them for the good. 2016, after all, will mark the 50th anniversary not of Johnson’s golden accomplishments but of the tortured year 1966, the year his presidency was overtaken by exploding violence in U.S. cities and Vietnam, the year his progressive coalition collapsed. As she ponders a campaign, Johnson’s most important lesson for Clinton may also be the most obvious: In politics, reality always changes much faster than you think.

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Writing used to be a solitary profession. How did it become so interminably social?

Whether we’re behind the podium or awaiting our turn, numbing our bottoms on the chill of metal foldout chairs or trying to work some life into our terror-stricken tongues, we introverts feel the pain of the public performance. This is because there are requirements to being a writer. Other than being a writer, I mean. Firstly, there’s the need to become part of the writing “community”, which compels every writer who craves self respect and success to attend community events, help to organize them, buzz over them, and—despite blitzed nerves and staggering bowels—present and perform at them. We get through it. We bully ourselves into it. We dose ourselves with beta blockers. We drink. We become our own worst enemies for a night of validation and participation.

Even when a dentist kills an adored lion, and everyone is furious, there’s loftier righteousness to be had.

Now is the point in the story of Cecil the lion—amid non-stop news coverage and passionate social-media advocacy—when people get tired of hearing about Cecil the lion. Even if they hesitate to say it.

But Cecil fatigue is only going to get worse. On Friday morning, Zimbabwe’s environment minister, Oppah Muchinguri, called for the extradition of the man who killed him, the Minnesota dentist Walter Palmer. Muchinguri would like Palmer to be “held accountable for his illegal action”—paying a reported $50,000 to kill Cecil with an arrow after luring him away from protected land. And she’s far from alone in demanding accountability. This week, the Internet has served as a bastion of judgment and vigilante justice—just like usual, except that this was a perfect storm directed at a single person. It might be called an outrage singularity.

Forget credit hours—in a quest to cut costs, universities are simply asking students to prove their mastery of a subject.

MANCHESTER, Mich.—Had Daniella Kippnick followed in the footsteps of the hundreds of millions of students who have earned university degrees in the past millennium, she might be slumping in a lecture hall somewhere while a professor droned. But Kippnick has no course lectures. She has no courses to attend at all. No classroom, no college quad, no grades. Her university has no deadlines or tenure-track professors.

Instead, Kippnick makes her way through different subject matters on the way to a bachelor’s in accounting. When she feels she’s mastered a certain subject, she takes a test at home, where a proctor watches her from afar by monitoring her computer and watching her over a video feed. If she proves she’s competent—by getting the equivalent of a B—she passes and moves on to the next subject.

The Wall Street Journal’s eyebrow-raising story of how the presidential candidate and her husband accepted cash from UBS without any regard for the appearance of impropriety that it created.

The Swiss bank UBS is one of the biggest, most powerful financial institutions in the world. As secretary of state, Hillary Clinton intervened to help it out with the IRS. And after that, the Swiss bank paid Bill Clinton $1.5 million for speaking gigs. TheWall Street Journal reported all that and more Thursday in an article that highlights huge conflicts of interest that the Clintons have created in the recent past.

The piece begins by detailing how Clinton helped the global bank.

“A few weeks after Hillary Clinton was sworn in as secretary of state in early 2009, she was summoned to Geneva by her Swiss counterpart to discuss an urgent matter. The Internal Revenue Service was suing UBS AG to get the identities of Americans with secret accounts,” the newspaper reports. “If the case proceeded, Switzerland’s largest bank would face an impossible choice: Violate Swiss secrecy laws by handing over the names, or refuse and face criminal charges in U.S. federal court. Within months, Mrs. Clinton announced a tentative legal settlement—an unusual intervention by the top U.S. diplomat. UBS ultimately turned over information on 4,450 accounts, a fraction of the 52,000 sought by the IRS.”

There’s no way this man could be president, right? Just look at him: rumpled and scowling, bald pate topped by an entropic nimbus of white hair. Just listen to him: ranting, in his gravelly Brooklyn accent, about socialism. Socialism!

And yet here we are: In the biggest surprise of the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, this thoroughly implausible man, Bernie Sanders, is a sensation.

He is drawing enormous crowds—11,000 in Phoenix, 8,000 in Dallas, 2,500 in Council Bluffs, Iowa—the largest turnout of any candidate from any party in the first-to-vote primary state. He has raised $15 million in mostly small donations, to Hillary Clinton’s $45 million—and unlike her, he did it without holding a single fundraiser. Shocking the political establishment, it is Sanders—not Martin O’Malley, the fresh-faced former two-term governor of Maryland; not Joe Biden, the sitting vice president—to whom discontented Democratic voters looking for an alternative to Clinton have turned.

During the multi-country press tour for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation, not even Jon Stewart has dared ask Tom Cruise about Scientology.

During the media blitz for Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation over the past two weeks, Tom Cruise has seemingly been everywhere. In London, he participated in a live interview at the British Film Institute with the presenter Alex Zane, the movie’s director, Christopher McQuarrie, and a handful of his fellow cast members. In New York, he faced off with Jimmy Fallon in a lip-sync battle on The Tonight Show and attended the Monday night premiere in Times Square. And, on Tuesday afternoon, the actor recorded an appearance on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he discussed his exercise regimen, the importance of a healthy diet, and how he still has all his own hair at 53.

Stewart, who during his career has won two Peabody Awards for public service and the Orwell Award for “distinguished contribution to honesty and clarity in public language,” represented the most challenging interviewer Cruise has faced on the tour, during a challenging year for the actor. In April, HBO broadcast Alex Gibney’s documentary Going Clear, a film based on the book of the same title by Lawrence Wright exploring the Church of Scientology, of which Cruise is a high-profile member. The movie alleges, among other things, that the actor personally profited from slave labor (church members who were paid 40 cents an hour to outfit the star’s airplane hangar and motorcycle), and that his former girlfriend, the actress Nazanin Boniadi, was punished by the Church by being forced to do menial work after telling a friend about her relationship troubles with Cruise. For Cruise “not to address the allegations of abuse,” Gibney said in January, “seems to me palpably irresponsible.” But in The Daily Show interview, as with all of Cruise’s other appearances, Scientology wasn’t mentioned.

An attack on an American-funded military group epitomizes the Obama Administration’s logistical and strategic failures in the war-torn country.

Last week, the U.S. finally received some good news in Syria:.After months of prevarication, Turkey announced that the American military could launch airstrikes against Islamic State positions in Syria from its base in Incirlik. The development signaled that Turkey, a regional power, had at last agreed to join the fight against ISIS.

The announcement provided a dose of optimism in a conflict that has, in the last four years, killed over 200,000 and displaced millions more. Days later, however, the positive momentum screeched to a halt. Earlier this week, fighters from the al-Nusra Front, an Islamist group aligned with al-Qaeda, reportedly captured the commander of Division 30, a Syrian militia that receives U.S. funding and logistical support, in the countryside north of Aleppo. On Friday, the offensive escalated: Al-Nusra fighters attacked Division 30 headquarters, killing five and capturing others. According to Agence France Presse, the purpose of the attack was to obtain sophisticated weapons provided by the Americans.

The Islamic State is no mere collection of psychopaths. It is a religious group with carefully considered beliefs, among them that it is a key agent of the coming apocalypse. Here’s what that means for its strategy—and for how to stop it.

What is the Islamic State?

Where did it come from, and what are its intentions? The simplicity of these questions can be deceiving, and few Western leaders seem to know the answers. In December, The New York Times published confidential comments by Major General Michael K. Nagata, the Special Operations commander for the United States in the Middle East, admitting that he had hardly begun figuring out the Islamic State’s appeal. “We have not defeated the idea,” he said. “We do not even understand the idea.” In the past year, President Obama has referred to the Islamic State, variously, as “not Islamic” and as al-Qaeda’s “jayvee team,” statements that reflected confusion about the group, and may have contributed to significant strategic errors.

Some say the so-called sharing economy has gotten away from its central premise—sharing.

This past March, in an up-and-coming neighborhood of Portland, Maine, a group of residents rented a warehouse and opened a tool-lending library. The idea was to give locals access to everyday but expensive garage, kitchen, and landscaping tools—such as chainsaws, lawnmowers, wheelbarrows, a giant cider press, and soap molds—to save unnecessary expense as well as clutter in closets and tool sheds.

The residents had been inspired by similar tool-lending libraries across the country—in Columbus, Ohio; in Seattle, Washington; in Portland, Oregon. The ethos made sense to the Mainers. “We all have day jobs working to make a more sustainable world,” says Hazel Onsrud, one of the Maine Tool Library’s founders, who works in renewable energy. “I do not want to buy all of that stuff.”

A controversial treatment shows promise, especially for victims of trauma.

It’s straight out of a cartoon about hypnosis: A black-cloaked charlatan swings a pendulum in front of a patient, who dutifully watches and ping-pongs his eyes in turn. (This might be chased with the intonation, “You are getting sleeeeeepy...”)

Unlike most stereotypical images of mind alteration—“Psychiatric help, 5 cents” anyone?—this one is real. An obscure type of therapy known as EMDR, or Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, is gaining ground as a potential treatment for people who have experienced severe forms of trauma.

Here’s the idea: The person is told to focus on the troubling image or negative thought while simultaneously moving his or her eyes back and forth. To prompt this, the therapist might move his fingers from side to side, or he might use a tapping or waving of a wand. The patient is told to let her mind go blank and notice whatever sensations might come to mind. These steps are repeated throughout the session.